Sitting on the corner of Heartache and Vine...

It has been a really interesting week. Some of you know that I had a heart attack Monday morning. I got out of the hospital yesterday. I will now try to summarize the gory details for you in all their splendor. Leslie was in Northern California this weekend at the Health and Harmony Festival. ( I tend toward Discord and Extravagance myself but as they say, it takes all kinds.)

Friday night I invited three couples over to the gallery for wine and cheese. Jim brought a 1990 Chateau Latour. John brought a Rubicon. I in turn poured my shitty Zinfandel down the sink. Sunday I got up and grabbed the weed eater and knocked down weeds for an hour and worked around the house. Mike Port's 90th birthday is June 12th so I drove to four of five shopping centers looking for a new blue jacket for him. This was a burnout and I never found anything. After that fruitless pursuit, I drove to my friend's Ron and Lena's on the coast and hung out for a little while. I bopped over to Encinitas to Sheila's house to say hello. She suggested a bike ride down to the YMCA to see our friends Billy and Karen's son's little league game. It was cool but I felt really whipped on the way back. We tooled through a few assisted living complexes but the ride back, although short, blitzed me out. My cardio has been really hard to get back since my surgery. Sheebz needed a little help in the garden and I carried a heavy cactus pot up her hill, but all was cool. Did a little gardening and fertilizing work and then we went to the Torrey Pines Lodge for dinner at Valentien's. There were cop cars everywhere because the U.S. Open festivities started the next day. I had the duck, of course, along with the Tuna Carpaccio, nothing heavy. Great time with a dear friend.

The next morning, I realized that I had sprained my hand lifting the large pot so I took an Advil. Within 20 minutes I had deep pain coursing though all the muscles in my chest, back and mostly the back side of my arms. Maybe I was having a drug reaction? I grabbed the Advil bottle and saw that their were contraindication warnings with blood thinners. ( I am on Coumadin). I called Bayer and they got a nurse on the line who suggested I get to an emergency room and who also said that it was not a drug reaction. I took the trash out and drove to the gas station, put 20 bucks in since I was near empty and didn't know what the future held.

I arrived at the Fallbrook Hospital Emergency Room and announced that I was having some sort of cardiac event. They whisked me past the muggles in the waiting room who gave me dirty looks for cutting in line, stuck me in ICU and took an enzyme panel. It was like .068. The next panel was 5 something and then 15, confirming that I had experienced my first heart attack. CK was over 500. I was hooked to a morphine/nitro drip. The Nitro gave me a searing left temporal headache. The next day I saw two of my cardiologists associates and they told me that I would have to be ambulanced to Scripps La Jolla since Fallbrook had no Cath Lab. I was very familiar with Scripps since I had my mitral valve repair there in July of 2006. I was fast tracked into an Angiogram (a procedure where an instrument is sent up the femoral artery in your groin and into the heart.) This procedure was actually administered by my old cardiologist and his partner. Luckily there were no blockages.

They later explained that their best guess was that the adrenalin from my over exertion on Sunday had caused a coronary artery to go into a paralytic spasm. I kept hearing about muscle damage because of the enzyme results but am still unclear as to the extent of such damage. I have a bunch of new drugs to add to my ever growing arsenal. They are putting me on a calcium channel blocker that will hopefully prevent this from happening again.

I shared my intensive care room at La Jolla with two other hard bitten cardiac offenders and a nurse who stayed in the room all night, Art. One guy had his 14th stint put in that day and the other guy, an overweight casino manager from Barona, was another multiple repeater. We were kidding around about ordering pizza and hookers at midnight. I felt like I was in a Eugene O'Neill play, surreal, dark and fascinating. Probably the blackest night of humour I have ever experienced, cutting to the bone, wish I had a recording. Nurses were running from the room in horror. The one guy's insurance had run out the day before his last heart attack and the procedure had cost him close to 200k. They knew more about what was going on than the nurses and grilled them mercilessly on every drug and instruction. I pretty much kept my mouth shut. My arms are now covered with holes from the multiple iv's and the constant injections. I got the dreaded Lovenox in the stomach. Nice sting.

Cardiac care and the hospital care I have experienced is like death by a thousand paper cuts. You lose all control and get pecked apart by sometimes painful invasive intrusions on an hourly basis. But maybe they keep you alive so there's a trade off.

Leslie picked me up around 12 yesterday - got my prescriptions filled and I will take it easy for a couple days. Thanks for the good wishes. Please don't tell my mother, yet. I need to see my cardiologist and find out what the hell happened. I had a checkup friday morning and inr and b.p. and everything looked great. Something went amiss in River City.

I am sure that there are lessons to be learned here. I am 50, not 20. I am not immortal. I need to be careful. I have to get control of my diet and cholesterol. But I don't want to give up the confit.

Take care,

Robert